So, I apparently am a sucker for modular floorcovering. I didn’t know this until I received the FLOR catalog in the mail. Flor offers lots of color, pattern, and texture options. I like the quilt-esque ones, but they were vetoed by the house’s other occupant. The compromise choice was a mixture of two color variants of “Thick and Thin”.
I think I might be addicted. This room (the upstairs guestroom/tv room) is now the funkiest and most fun one in the house.
We are what we eat, and the choices we make about food matter in terms of our personal health, the health of the soil, and energy consumption. So, to act on our good environmental intentions, and to connect ourselves more deeply with our local community, we joined with another couple to purchase a Community Supported Agriculture Share. Together with our friends, we will share in whatever a local organic farm, Tantre Farm, has on offer. Each week we’ll pick up our locally grown organic vegetable goodness from the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. I’m excited about this.
While I’m still playing with the idea of ridding myself of my automobile, more angst is coming from wrestling with whether I need to leave my job, or how I can change it so that I can stay.
It’s funny. I have been reading Go Put Your Strengths to Work, and after the exercises in which the reader diagnoses what is and isn’t working in a week’s worth of work activities, Marcus Buckingham includes a long section counseling the reader not to dump her/his job and rush off in search of the next one. He writes that while the “eject” button is the dramatic solution (a leap into the dark to the next situation, which may or may not be a better fit), we can iteratively move our current job closer to our perfect job through attention and goal-setting. Certainly I have the most negotiating power with the folks who already respect me and depend on me (that is, my current team and employer). It’s annoying to be right where Marcus Buckingham predicts I would be. I’d prefer to be unique.
So, it is listmaking time for me, figuring out what it is I can’t do without, what I can trade for other things, what it is I can no longer do, what I have to ask others for…
Things I need: team, writing, collaboration, clients, change, variety, action. I want to have different problems than we did last year, than we did last quarter. I want to be making different mistakes.
Things that concern me: I don’t want to be the single point of failure or hero. I want to build or participate in a system where I and our clients are supported by a team with overlapping interests and responsibilities. I’d like to be replaceable. I’d like a little slack in the system, a little redundancy. I don’t know how to do that in a small team. I think we simply need to be bigger.
But, there is an upside. I have shed some tasks and responsibilities that were mine that weren’t right. I removed myself from some email lists (like Perry Marshall’s), re-examined some of my work habits (yes, there are ways I have participated in creating my own angst), and essentially spring cleaned my office and my job description. Yes, whether I’m happy at work really is up to me. Whatever the outcome, this realization is a good, if painful, thing.
I probably don’t seem like a rabid sports fan, as I can’t quote many statistics and I rarely attend live games. But, over the last few years, I’ve watched the ESPN sports show Pardon the Interruption (PTI) almost daily.
I’m hooked on the good natured, playful banter between the two hosts – Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. They maintain the format with guest host appearances by folks like Dan Le Batard from the Miami Herald and Bob Ryan from the Boston Globe, to name a few. My attachment to PTI is so deep that I am disappointed when it is supplanted by an actual sporting event on ESPN, and I tune into Dan Le Batard’s deeply silly AM radio show when I’m in Florida. And, I’m planning on knitting Tony “stat boy” Reali’s bird sweater and coercing my husband into wearing it. Now if only I can get my husband to pretend that I win every game we play like Stat Boy does for Tony Kornheiser. Here’s the sign I’m a goner: they even make me interested in golf, not watching golf, but listening to them talk about it.
I like the very human perspective PTI’s hosts take on sports: games, athletes, coaches, and the media. I appreciate the silly parts – long-running jokes about the “bald brotherhood”, Uranus, and ripping on each other in a fraternal rather than mean spirited way.
I appreciate their reasoned candor about such “elephants in the stadium” as race, gender, money and our perceptions thereof. For instance, they made me think about why the media/public get more bent out of shape when black basketball players tussle than when white hockey players go at it. They actually mention womens collegiate and professional sports (not a huge part of their show, but more info than I’d get otherwise).
But I think their best feature is their manner of debate – largely positive, sometimes good natured teasing, now and then emphatic, but rarely mean-spirited. The two hosts have genuine good will for each other, the games, the coaches, and the players, and that makes the show for me. A nice break from more dogmatic role-play-ish political talking heads that had been my standard model of “debate” in the media.
So, the theme of the last month has been getting rid of stuff: trying to align my current possessions and situation with who I am now and who I intend to become, rather than who I have been.
I’m warming up to get rid of my car. We’re going to take the ancient Jeep up to Tobermory Airport and leave it in the field next to the runway for when we fly up north. My goal is not to replace it. I walk to work, and I can use my husband’s car for errands on the weekends. I’m considering using ZipCar to fill in the gaps.
My main lifestyle hindrance/regret will be I will no longer be able to go to my favorite yoga studio, A2Yoga, at the drop of a hat. I have been attending some 5:30 classes on some Mondays and Wednesdays, which means that I have to rush home, change, grab my car from the street, and get there. There are at least five yoga studios within walking distance of my home and work. I suppose I could go to one that doesn’t require a car. Or, I could start using my Go! Pass to get to A2Yoga on weeknights. Maybe going carless won’t be so bad.
We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
So, in Meyers-Briggs personality lingo, I am an intuitive feeler (INFJ). I’ve seen this type described more than once as a “dolphin,” essentially navigating the world based on complex emotional echolocation. (warm…warmer…nope cooler again…drat!) How I feel about things is crucial, and I am at least wise about myself enough to know that it is difficult to project how I will feel about something until I experience it.
In practice, what this means is that I make mistakes and “bump into walls” as I figure things out. It can’t be helped; it is my process. Maybe actual dolphins are more graceful in practice.
That most of us are bad at predicting how we’ll feel in a new situation is one of the themes of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. Research sugests that we can understand how we *might* feel about something by talking to someone who is having that experience.
Ah hah! I can use books and other people’s brains to help me narrow down the set of things I need to go out and experience to understand! Amazing. Maybe I can avoid a few walls that way.
For that reason, I find the exploration of emotions aggregated from blogs in We Feel Fine interesting. I don’t yet know how to interpret it. I have to spend more time experiencing it. But, it gives me a sense of being connected to others through the irrational network of emotion. That’s kinda cool all on its own.